Facts suggest vets delayed own tests to make Obama look bad

"The NBA is the black America pastime." [Bumped]

Basketball teams are not as valuable as football and baseball teams. There are a number of reasons for it, but the big reason is the league is so poorly run. Maybe that’s fixable. On the other hand, a sport narrowly focused on 13% of the population has a clear ceiling. On the other other hand, business continue to chase the homosexual trade, despite that being 2% of the market. Anyone who says people are rational is not paying attention.

The citizen of every modern Nation State

is fully integrated with that machinery: strapped into place and identifiable by serial number.

There is nothing voluntary in his participation: the definition of an “outlaw” has been amended over time, to mean specifically failure to cooperate with any government agent, or to surrender immediately to his demands. (I laugh, bitterly, when a media smartie proposes e.g. mandatory voting, as if adding more idiots to the electorate will improve anything. And yet I welcome it as a frank admission that democracy is a totalitarian creed.)

Our food-stamp program has many problems,

but imagine what a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare it would be if,

instead of the current practice of giving poor people vouchers for food, we applied the VA model and attempted to have the government deliver the service itself rather than simply paying for it. That would mean federally operated farms, ranches, and slaughterhouses, government grocery stores, warehouses, distribution centers, transportation networks, etc., all managed with the competence and decency exhibited by the VA.

May 29, 2014

"Thank me. Thank me so very much."

Even though this is ostensibly a graduation speech it is really about me.

My ratings have been slipping of late and my media advisors said a photo-op in Bagram and a speech at West Point will boost the polls by about 3 points.....

It will be your generation’s task to accept temporary sacrifices,

in which for the first time you will seem poorer than your parents; be the first generation of West Pointers to be everywhere on the defensive, be the first Americans whose fundamental duty is groveling in public.

But that’s just another way of leading,

leading from behind. We’ll win by losing. You have to be smart, as smart as I am, to see it.

Two Generations Lost to Communism

On a visit towards the end of last year,

I expected to be unimpressed by Cuban living standards and economic infrastructure. Even so, the extent of the poverty, backwardness and decay came as a shock, and this article will argue that Cuba must have lower incomes per head now than 55 years ago, at the time of the Castro takeover.

Just take in the chilling, Communistic ugliness of that phrase for a moment: The Military Opportunities for Mothers Act. [MOM] What a wonderful euphemism for institutionalized child abuse. What a succinct summary of the reduction of woman to a unit of production and tool of the State-God.

DeBlasio's New New York:“Rat Reservoirs,”

which are areas where rodent populations survive and thrive, such as subways, sewers and city parks. It’s welcome news for many city residents, who claim rats — some the size of small dogs or cats — are running rampant in their neighborhoods A sanitation worker said he has to shake and kick bags of garbage to scatter the rats for fear they’ll jump up and bite him.

May 28, 2014

"Nobody wanted these veterans dead, but dead they are."

How is it possible that the government of the United States of America — arguably the most powerful organization of any sort in the history of the human race, in possession of a navy, a nuclear arsenal, and a vast police apparatus —

cannot ensure that its own employees and contractors do not negligently kill its other employees and former employees? Never mind providing veterans with world-class medical care — the federal government cannot even prevent bureaucratic homicide. All of the political will is behind having a decent VA, and there is nothing to be gained politically from having a horrific one. How can it be that, with everybody free to vote as he pleases and to propose such policies as please him, we end up with what nobody wants?

Evil is the Motive of Evil

Here in our own country, there is an ideology that is obsessed with controlling and shaping all of human behavior.

We call that ideology by many names such as liberalism or progressivism, but it's more accurately a diseased narcissism whose followers strive to stamp out anyone who doesn't think like them and to control the lives of everyone else.

"If a president has to explicitly deny a meme that has arisen about him, then it's almost certainly true."

The liberal philosphy in a nutshell:

If you are black/white/hispanic/asian/LGBT and we agree on everything in politics or values = good person. If you are black/white/hispanic/asian/LGBT and we disagree on anything in politics or values = evil racist bigoted hate speaking Oreo Uncle Tom hatemonger who must be destroyed. House of Eratosthenes

Afghanistan: “Withdrawal in contact”

As American combat forces dwindle

— assuming they do not have to pull up stakes peremptorily if no agreement with Afghans is reached — the problems of “withdrawal in contact” will re-emerge. The US troops will have to protect with less and less. They have to secure their line of march, line of departure and both flanks all the way to the airhead or port.

May 27, 2014

The total disregard for truth by the ruling class is like a tidal wave of sewage.

The foulness of it makes it hard to focus on anyone bit.

We have no idea how many people signed up through these websites. We have no idea how many actually bought insurance. We have no idea how many had insurance, but were canceled due to this silly law. We don’t know how many went on Medicaid.

No one knows because the government refuses to publish the numbers for examination by the citizens.

The lefty media, however, takes whatever the rulers say on faith. I guess all that talking truth to power stuff was just more bullshit.

This is the central feature of the Custodial State.

The government is never going to be very good at tending to the needs of the citizens. The abuses coming out of the Veterans Administration are just the beginning. The response will be habitual lying by the ruling elites to the point where no one knows what is truth and what is fiction. This, of course, trickles down to the rest of us.

Ours is now a dishonesty society.

Nothing is on the level. Everything is a deal. No deal is too small or too outlandish. And, it is only going to get worse.

What Causes the Smell After Rain

There are three primary sources of smells that commonly occur after rain.

The first, the "clean" smell, in particular after a heavy thunderstorm, is caused by ozone. Ozone (scientifically known as trioxygen due to the fact that it is comprised of three oxygen atoms) is notably pungent and has a very sharp smell that is often described as similar to that of chlorine. Some people can smell ozone before the storm has even arrived.

When Black Amazons Had Style

According to David Sax, the most successful food trends

reflect what’s going on in society at a given time.

Americans wanted cupcakes ten years ago, he told Brickman, because they sought childhood comforts after the trauma of 9/11; Americans wanted fondue in the sixties because they aspired to cosmopolitanism. Artisanal toast, one might posit, represents our intensifying obsession with and fetishization of food. Every meal is special and important, every dish should be elevated, revered, and broadcast—even something as pedestrian as toast.

It is at this point that the “terrible if’s” accumulate.

The most disturbing thing about Barack Obama’s presidency has been his inclination to lie.

One might think the president’s real foreign policy competent or incompetent. But one cannot argue that it is what he says it is. The Benghazi attack was not about a video. Nor were his sanctions going to do much to stop Russia. If he actually believed what he said we would be in bigger trouble than if he were lying to us. There are none so blind as they who will not see.

How Vermont Could Become the Napa Valley of Hard Cider

With just a few shakes, hundreds of apples dropped onto the tarps like a raucous rain. Davis reached down for one of the apples, small and misshapen, and took a bite. It was so bitter and tart that anyone else would have spit it out.“Perfect,” he said. - Modern Farmer

Before Go Pro

Nowadays, anyone can throw down a couple hundred bucks and have a camera ready to record any adventure that they like.

Back in Steve McQueen's day, you needed an insane amount of gear, the knowledge to use it, the skill to make the right mounting and the brass to be willing to put all that expensive gear in a totally high-risk situation.

Global Bullshit Level Rises

One “mock voicemail” (which takes place in the year 2065) has a man calling his mother and saying, “"If the tsunami doesn't get us, the heat might.... I’m just calling to say I love you and I miss you and it might be the last time you hear my voice. Bye.”

A Boeing 767 at 41,000 Feet and 469 Knots and Out of Gas

That Time a Commercial Aircraft Ran Out of Fuel Mid-Flight: Of course, while a Boeing 767 is perfectly capable of gliding to some extent, even fully loaded, many of the systems within the plane were not designed to run without the engines. Thus, a byproduct of the engines dying was the loss of many of the systems and instruments on the plane due to lack of electricity, leaving them with only basic instruments.

On Bullshit

We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.

And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis.

In the beginning....

May 26, 2014

"The Japanese: Nuked Too Much or Not Enough?"

Delusion mapping T-shirt (excluding tax) / 3,500 yen :

T-shirt to realize the delusion world that people are secretly imagined. The delusion mapping techniques error code own works, and exposed to the light of day the stark world that people envision secretly. You also print T-shirt "wind look turned up" the concept? ... Sure to attract the attention of people in this. This t-shirt Bring to Life the World of Delusion That People Secretly envision

Breaking!

We were creating a monster

— the Boomers who came behind us and thought we were cool because we were the first to protest,

the first to rock till we dropped, the first to smoke dope, the first to drop acid, the first to… well, never mind. We weren’t the first to do anything, really. We we were just the first popularizers, the first to infiltrate the American mind in such a profound way that the wrong people became the heroes. After us, patriotism was out, ROTC was out, America the Beautiful was out. Now we have a country of Barack Obama and veterans who are wait-listed for medical care and a foreign policy — not to mention a world — in shambles because this once great land leads from behind, if at all. Sorry. I was just a kid. I didn’t know what I was doing.

"The lie in the black heart of democracy is that we can overcome Caesar by electing another Caesar."

To my mind, it is nevertheless incumbent upon every Christian: to understand the nature of our political order;

that it is answerable, ultimately, to the Prince of This World; that it stands in open defiance to the claims of Christ; and that we, as Christians, cannot honour it without dishonouring Our Lord. For the demands of pagan Caesar are no different today than they were in the first centuries: that we bow before his abstract image, worship and pay taxes to him; that we publicly subordinate our conscience to his ghastly will.

From the moment I saw his famous video, I couldn’t hate Elliot Rodger.

He was too pathetic to hate, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. That didn’t make him less evil.

At some point his rage opened him to cruel thoughts. They flooded into him like the ocean roaring into the funnel of a foundering ship until they filled him to the brim. So that on his last day of rage he was completely consumed by what in former times people called the Devil.

But the Devil doesn’t exist you know. Or so we are told.

We’ve purged him from our modern, secular, shrink-ridden world. But by whatever alias he lives under now, Elliot Rodgers is a reminder that the power of the idea walks among us as fiercely as ever. He can materialize, quite suddenly, whether over New York City or in California, you never know when.

The Problem With Conservative Inc.

My conservative friends hate that I have zero interest in supporting Republicans.

They really hate it when I say the best thing that could happen is for the GOP to fold up. You’re never going to beat a well armed and well organized religious cult with pleading and stammering. That’s all the GOP has to offer. The cause of this, however, is the deluded views of Conservative Inc.

May 25, 2014

The Library is one of those institutions

through which the Radical Left has been making its long march - - with absolutely no resistance.

Its directors take it as axiomatic that Left is right. Anything hip, cool, feminist, queer, LGBT, black, iconoclastic, multicultural, Left-leaning, or not-so-quiet gets the OK. Whatever is not any of those things does not even exist. A building dedicated to the achievements of Homer, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, and other eminent writers must now accommodate the pretentious junk promoted by "hip-hop artists."

Whatever happened to "Crazy"?

"Everybody is wanting to know what music were the kids listening to, or what movies were they watching. Who gives a fuck what they was watching? Whatever happened to crazy? What, you can't be crazy no more? Should we eliminate crazy from the dictionary?"Eliott Rodger’s murder spree is a tip-off that something is wrong with our society.

But, allowing guns is not likely to be what’s amiss, since there are so many people who own and use guns who wouldn’t do anything like what he did. Ditto for the young guys who are frustrated because they can’t get girls. In fact, the more you read up on this guy, the more you see this chaotic mixed-bag hodge-podge of normal and sick-n-twisted; I find it unavoidable to conclude that the latter started out as the former.

Obamacare is a technical mess and a public relations disaster,

a bomb that has been radioactive to all who come near it.

Thus far, it has terminated the careers of almost 70 national Democrats, given the Republicans control of 26 states, and brought in a new crew of GOP leaders inspired by fighting it, just when it seemed that the well had run dry. It has overwhelmed Obama’s presidency, destroyed any chance to build a center-left coalition, or to pass any other big bills. As it was four years ago, it is the central issue in the midterm elections, and the reason the Democrats may lose big again.

California Then and Now

May 24, 2014

The Cowardice of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates is really just a grifter.

He’s not well read or educated, but he knows how to game liberal elites into giving him stuff. He reads enough to drop references and book titles with some skill. That pleases SWPL types. He does the authentic black guy bit by living in Harlem (the gentrified part) and posing as a hostile black man. He’s checking off all the boxed for his benefactors.

Expressive hat defends wearer from undesirable actions

The president and the enablers

Excuse me, did I say “will take it anyway”? What Schumer actually said was [emphasis mine]: "If [House Republicans] don’t pass immigration reform [by the August recess], the president will have no choice but to act on his own."

it’s long been clear that President Obama considers that the Constitution, with its checks and balances, offers no real constraint to his usurpation of power. Actually, it never really was the Constitution that prevented previous presidents from doing the same thing—it was their own respect for it, plus the checks and balances offered by integrity-driven members of those presidents’ own parties who would pressure them to do the right thing, and/or a press that would call them on their excesses, and/or voters who would reject them if they violated constitutional constraints. Obama doesn’t have to deal with such things, and that emboldens him.

On the controversial 9/11 image known as ”The Falling Man”

AHL: Why did you make a film about this particular photograph?
HS: Because it essentially disappeared.

It ran in many newspapers on the day after 9/11. In the film we go to a newspaper called the Morning Call in Allentown Pennsylvania. In the film, the photo editor, Naomi Halperin, talks about how striking the image was. There were so many images coming across the wire that day but this one stood out for her because it encapsulated the horror of the day.

Massed-society is nothing but sexual/racial politics;

it is an internalized Marxist theory where different groups within the society struggle against one another.

"Diversity Proximity=Warfare", "Feminism is destroying marriage", and all these other truisms that honest writers write about. These pervasive social ills which result when the upper class turns away from promoting virtue, and instead seeks out progressive means of exploiting their charges. The results are the self-hating Whites, the benighted Feminists, the multi-culti Jews, the impoverished Blacks, and all of the other brand-new special interest groups

Currently on Ka-Ching

May 23, 2014

There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed

26 Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.
27 What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops.
28 And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Matthew 10

Always Attack

Sharpton is a festering carbuncle of a man.

A sensible society would have scraped off that bit a filth from the shoe a long time ago. Instead the official religion of the country celebrates the guy. People who style themselves as the opposition, like Sean Hannity, treat the guy with respect. As soon as you concede ground to these guys, you lose. That’s why you always have to be on offense. If dozens of private guerrilla video makers are ambushing guys like Sharpton and posting their work, the tide begins to turn. If a James O’Keefe type of operation does a 30 minute piece of Chris Mathews whites-only neighborhood, it forces that fat lunatic to go on defense, rather than rant and rave about normal people. There’s plenty of money in the normalville to finance this stuff.

Another 171 Million People Who Don’t Care What Progressives Think

The results are in from the Indian parliamentary elections,

and the big news is that a religious and nationalist party—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—has swept into power, in the process crushing the secular Indian National Congress (INC, or simply the Congress) that has dominated Indian politics since independence.

Nicolas de Largillière, Portrait of a Woman (Detail), 1696

Did giving blacks civil rights threaten the government? Not at all.

The entrenchment of the welfare state and prison system makes blacks easy to control.... and not since the days of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers have blacks threatened the state.

They are harmless sheep just like white people. Let them have their rap music, sports, and thug culture to keep them busy, and as an extra bonus we’ll divert the energies of intelligent white men into hating blacks instead of using that brain power to find out exactly how they’re being screwed over by the state.

Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum

ARKHAM, MA—Arguing that students should return to the fundamentals taught in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon in order to develop the skills they need to be driven to the very edge of sanity, Arkham school board member Charles West continued to advance his pro-madness agenda at the district's monthly meeting Tuesday. | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

A Trail of Murder and Revenge in Papua New Guinea

They entered the clearing from the far end of the track, fast, with a level of aggression that shocked King.

Three men, each wearing homemade balaclavas with small eyeholes, sprouting strange little ears, like Halloween masks. One carried a World War II–era .303 rifle, the two others three-foot-long machetes, known as bush knives in PNG. One of the machete carriers also had a sawed-off shotgun. The men were short, small. “Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!” they yelled, pidgin English for “lie down.”

OK, OK, make it four. Possibly five. Maybe six. Or even seven. More?

“Why are you attacking these poor girls? They’re just idiots doing what they’re told! You should be going after the people in charge instead!”

Newsflash: journalists who support evil regimes are as morally culpable as the regimes themselves,

even if they don’t directly participate in their evil acts. This was established by the Nuremberg Trials: journalists who egged on German war crimes were hanged alongside the Nazi officials who actually carried them out. I don’t care if Figalora and her comrades aren’t getting paid to smear me, how low on the totem pole they are or any of that crap: the mere fact that they’re working for the MSM makes them my adversaries. Does a soldier on the battlefield concern himself with the fact that the enemies he’s shooting at might be nice guys who are just following orders? No: he nuts up, does his duty and pulls the trigger.

Dissing the Kid: Putin on Obama:

"Who is he to judge? Who is he to judge, seriously?"

The crowd began to laugh and clap. "If he wants to judge people, why doesn't he get a job in court somewhere?" ..... Then, after a pause, "What is it that interested you about what [Obama] said?" At that point, both the interviewer and the crowd broke out in laughter.

NEW YORK - Former Vice President Al Gore issued a joint statement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this morning

warning that unless drastic measures are taken this year to curb global warming, millions of people’s heads are going to explode. Speaking to U.N. delegates at the One World Economic Forum, Gore said the cumulative effects of drought, famine, global civil wars and eroding national monuments will spark what scientists call “homocranialcombustible” – or in layman’s terms, exploding human heads.

The role of the sycophant press in a utopia is to keep the mob in a state of frenzy.

The frenzy requires the mob be terrified at utterly imaginary Chicken-Little style dangers while drugged and numb to real dangers.

The frenzy requires the mob to be forever discontented at whoever the designated enemy is: in Nazi Germany, the designated enemy the Jew; in Communist Russia, the Capitalist and the Jew; in Islamic nations, the Great Satan and the Jew; in America, the rich, the white, the male, the Christian and the Jew. In all cases, the sycophant press can never report on real dangers, because this would require the Glorious Leader do actually do something to solve a problem. But imaginary dangers (Global Warming, Hole in the Ozone Layer, DDT, Acid Rain, Alar, White Supremacists, Hate Crimes, Homophobia, Heterosexual AIDS, Sexual Harassment, Income Inequality, Gender Income Bias, Theocracy) require nothing but giving the Glorious Leader ever more power to solve them.

NC BBQ Restaurant With Prominent “NO GUNS” Sign Robbed at Gunpoint

[The sign is] not just some generic “No Guns” sign the owner, Greg Hatem picked up down at the local sign emporium.

No, these are custom jobs. He went out of his way to make custom signs to make sure we gun owners felt unwelcome. …let me describe it. The three pictograms are labeled “NC State Capitol,” “NC Legislative Building,” and “The Pit.” Above the pictograms it says, “No Weapons” and below, “No Concealed Firearms.”

Federal funds earmarked to offset Affordable Care Act insurer losses

The move was buried in hundreds of pages of new regulations issued late last week.

It comes as part of an intensive administration effort to hold down premium increases for next year, a top priority for the White House as the rates will be announced ahead of this fall's congressional elections. Administration officials for months have denied charges by opponents that they plan a "bailout" for insurance companies providing coverage under the healthcare law.

Me and that big stupid mower.

Once, because I felt like it, I spied a largish hornets nest and attacked.

I lumbered up and ground their volley ball sized Death Star clear to topsoil leaving a cloud of angry by very battered insects wondering what the hell had just happened. I somehow reversed the mighty beast and safely got out of there without a scratch.

Find your tribe. Most people who survive a witch-hunt do so because they have a loyal fanbase or tribe they’ve aligned themselves with.

You do not have to have an inherently political business to align yourself with a tribe. While it might not seem like a family business making duck calls lends itself to conservative Christianity, the reason the patriarch of Duck Dynasty kept his job was because he aligned himself with a very large, loyal, and vocal Christian fanbase.

Never buy peanut butter again with this easy wok fried recipe

Never Gets Old

Strange Findings on Comb Jellies Uproot Animal Family Tree

A close look at the nervous system of the gorgeously iridescent animal known as the comb jelly has led a team of scientists to propose a new evolutionary history: one for the comb jelly, and one for everybody else. - - NatGeo

Ever notice how many terrorists that Obama attracts to his regime?

In the wake of the VA scandal, and this morning's briefing with Secretary Shinseki, the President is immediately diving in to "making sure our veterans get the care, benefits, and services that they need."

From the White House: The President will welcome the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks to the White House to honor the team and their Super Bowl XLVIII victory. This visit will continue the tradition begun by President Obama of honoring sports teams for their efforts to give back to their communities. This event in the East Room is open to pre-credentialed media.

"Can anyone name a significant American achievement in world affairs over the past five years?"

The room was completely silent. Since the group had traveled widely, I posed a second question,

"Have any of you visited countries where relations with America are better than five years ago?" Again, silence. These were people who zip all over the globe and deal with senior officials. Many had backed Barack Obama's historic presidential candidacy in 2008 and his re-election in 2012. Yet they were stumped when asked to name any recent achievement in American foreign policy.

Why futurologists are always wrong

his belief system is structurally identical to that of the Southern hot gospellers who warn of the impending “Rapture”, the moment when the blessed will be taken up into paradise and the rest of us will be left to seek salvation in the turmoil of the Tribulation before Christ returns to announce the end of the world. Kurzweil’s idea of “the singularity” is the Rapture for geeks – in this case the blessed will create an intelligent computer that will give them eternal life either in their present bodies or by uploading them into itself. Like the Rapture, it is thought to be imminent. Kurzweil forecasts its arrival in 2045.

Thomas Friedman is a guy who appears to learn the jargon of science and technology,

but knows nothing about science and technology.

His skill is flattering rich people, especially his wife who is mega-rich. This allows Friedman to flit around the world telling rich people they are the best. The court jester has been a feature of human societies since the Bronze Age. Telling the boss he’s wonderful by predicting the current course will lead to times of plenty is never going to get you fed to the lions.

The Cult Jester

This is a guy, but it can be a gal, who says and writes foolish things that flatter the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

As in the old days, they come in different types. An example of the natural fool is the comedian/satirist. Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert and Bill Maher are examples of guys who pass themselves off as clowns mocking greater society, but they are really selling flattery to the Left. Their audience barks and claps like trained seals, a part of the performance, as the fool says nasty things about the enemies of The Cult. Satirists are almost always the most fanatical conformists.

The unpleasant drag queen who used to run Libya

knew how to keep these groups under control.

Instead of working with the old buzzard, we listened to the Europeans, and participated in an insane war to have him removed. By the time we decided that Qaddafi was the devil, he was cooperating with us in the battle against the Islamists, had given up his involvement in international terrorism, and abandoned his WMD program. He was like an old repentant Mafia chieftain who sought to make points with the FBI.

You cannot escape, you will be absorbed!

"weary of multicultural stock photos? well too damn bad!

the cover of every kid's textbook, every magazine advertisement, every college brochure, every TV commercial, every government pamphlet, urgently, frantically, demands -- DEMANDS! -- more more more interracial joy. to pass a TV or a newsstand these days is to clinch & grimace. this pathetically desperate Big Brother "lean across the finish line" insistence on the happy human family (of satisfied corporate consumers and forward-looking progressive voters). yet no amount of multicult propaganda (or homosexual propaganda) will make it "normal", it will always be painfully fake and never real."

The List for the Guillotine Just Got One Name Longer

— fresh off being caught eating his own earwax on camera — was caught red-handed (or is it yellow-fingered?) in another gaffe this week, claiming that low crime rates in border cities with lots of federal immigration workers is proof that “Communism works.”

The Cargo Cults and John Frum

Some aver that the name “Frum” is simply a pidgin form of “from,” and that the saviors entire name is “John Frum (from) America.”

.... ‘Cultists’ began to destroy all their Western possessions, throwing their hard-earned money into the sea. . . . as an act of faith . . . . [Eventually] the Sabbath migrated to Friday, on which day John Frum was celebrated with singing, dancing and kava-drinking, a joyful inversion of the dour Presbyterian past. . . . . Finally, on February 15th 1957, an American flag was ceremonially raised in Sulphur Bay and the new religion officially announced . . . .

May 20, 2014

Still. Life.

[Bumped] We have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is.

It is NOT melted cheese over a tortilla chip.

It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply ‘bro food’ halftime. It is in fact, old— older even than the great cuisines of Europe and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated. A true mole sauce, for instance, can take DAYS to make, a balance of freshly (always fresh) ingredients, painstakingly prepared by hand. It could be, should be, one of the most exciting cuisines on the planet.

This Just In

Marine Corps Cyberspace Command unveiled a new Twitter task force of Marine Expeditionary Hashtaggers (MEH). “This is a whole new theater of warfare,” said MARFORCYBER spokesman Lt. Col. Brock Ruggedsson. “The Marines of the MEH will significantly impact world events 140 outraged characters at a time. They will heed the clarion call of battle not in the front line but in the social media trenches online. The MEH will fight our countries battles via Twitter, on Facebook, and YouTube.”

Exhibit A for Executing Traitors in a Swift and Decisive Manner

was given special attention from the Pentagon, and will now likely be transferred to a civilian prison where he can receive “treatment” for his “Gender Dysphoria.” Meanwhile, veterans and free citizens of the United States have waited for years, even until death, for legitimate medical treatment of life threatening physical ailments.

Libya evacuation decision 'minute by minute,' U.S. official says

A decision to evacuate as violence in the Libyan capital grows is "minute by minute, hour by hour,"

a defense official told CNN on Monday. Fierce fighting swept across the city Sunday after armed men stormed the country's interim Parliament. Sporadic bursts of gunfire and blasts could still be heard on the outskirts of the capital Monday evening.

Do you know where you are in the Milky Way?

We can point to our home on a globe, and find Earth in a model of the solar system, but where are we in the Milky Way? All spiral arms lead to the Milky Way’s centre.

There, a bar of stars in long, looping orbits forms the tapered shape of a cat’s pupil. This eye is 27,000 light years across – nearly as wide as the distance between Earth and the galactic centre – and pokes out of the galaxy’s plane at a 45º angle. Above and below this midsection, nearly 200 spheres, each packed with hundreds of thousands of ancient stars, orbit. Out of the Milky Way’s plane, these ‘globular clusters’ live their long lives in isolation from each other and the rest of the galaxy. If Earth were inside one of them, our night sky would beam down thousands of stars as bright as Sirius.

Why Does Jonah Goldberg Want To Block The Backlash Against Political Correctness?

Whenever I read a syndicated column by Jonah Goldberg that touches on the historical past, I expect to find nothing of substance.

And I’m rarely disappointed. A widely-featured mouthpiece of Conservatism, Inc., Jonah has about the same relation to historical erudition that Jay Z has to Mozart’s minuets: a bit less than none.... He has simply internalized the Leftist indoctrination given to his generation—which is a particularly necessary professional qualification for Conservatism Inc. apparatchiks, who (I have long argued) are basically Judas goats, leading the faithful to accept liberalism.

The Rise of the Campus Brown Shirts

This would all be great fodder for Saturday Night Live, if it still had any spine.

Or a tough conservative or libertarian comedy show, if there were one. But in the final analysis, it’s not all that funny. Something is seriously wrong with our university system — as if we didn’t know. And the fault is less with the students — they are what they are and finally just young people — as with the faculties, especially in the social sciences and what’s left of the humanities.

Hillary's Drain Bamage, the Early Years

The Decay of NYC Continues Apace

NYPD told to carry spray paint to cover graffiti: Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said. The cops were even given instructions like “spray a square around the tag and then fill it in.”

Correction

May 19, 2014

Hillary’s Brain on Drudge

"Hey! Hillary’s brain is off-limits! Leave her health records alone!

Democrats are right – scouring records of a female candidate is just politics of personal destruction, and for the media to engage in it would be unfair, unethical, and absolutely UNPRECEDENTED. You can’t probe a woman like that because, well, it’s a war on women!"

[Gay] Federal Judge Strikes Down Oregon's Same-Sex Marriage Ban

The endless wave of judicial activism continues in the state of Oregon, where U.S District Judge Michael McShane has just struck down the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, reports Fox News.

[And, unlike the other judges, McShane also happens to be one of just nine openly gay members of the federal judiciary, according to the Human Rights Campaign. It's an unusual combination of factors for the 53-year-old jurist, who has served as a federal judge for less than a year. McShane, citing the sensitivity of the case, declined to be interviewed for this story. But friends say they're confident he'll produce a careful decision while setting aside any personal feelings.]

[Updated] Potemkin Parking Lots: How Many Hundreds of Thousands of Unsold New Cars Rot?

Tens of thousands of cars are still being made every week but hardly any of them are being sold.

Nearly every household in developed countries already has a car or even two or three cars parked up on their driveway as it is. Below is an image of thousands upon thousands of unsold cars parked up on a runway near St Petersburg in Russia. They are all imported from Europe, they are all then parked up and they are all then left to rot. Consequently, the airport is now unusable for its original purpose.

I Checked My Privilege, And It's Doing Just Fine

Liberals have a new word for what normal people call “success.” They call it “privilege,”

as if a happy, prosperous life is the result of some magic process related to where your great-great-great-grandfather came from. It’s the latest leftist argument tactic, which means it is a tactic designed to prevent any argument and to beat you into rhetorical submission. Conservatives, don’t play their game.

Short Reads

Abramson Breaks Glass Ceiling (On the Way Down)

It seems it was mostly due to all the faux testosterone that Abramson was throwing around.

Something almost all female high flying execs do. At the same time she was pulling out the feminist big guns to complain about her pay package compared to the last editor who was (gasp) a male. She has been replaced with the first black editor of The New York Times. So all the liberal stars are back in alignment.

"Heart of Darkness" had it right when it advised all to...

Example: An old colleague emailed me a nasty picture yesterday.

It was of two Pakistani boys beating a small puppy to death on a roadside. He wrote under it, "Remember?" I did. I remembered the savagery with which Pakistanis treated animals, especially dogs. They showed no sympathy or empathy for the needless suffering of animals, and seemed to enjoy inflicting pain on them.

Will the last business out of California light a match and burn the state to the ground?

it's rather astonishing to see politicians from the industrial Los Angeles suburb of Irwindale do all they can to chase the largest and rarest investor in their town out. But that's what they've done, hauling the Huy Fong company into court and winning an injunction from the Los Angeles Superior Court to force the $60 million company to cease operations during the three months in autumn when it grinds up locally grown hot peppers for its famous Sriracha hot sauce, which now flavors packaged food from ice cream to popcorn. Apparently, some locals don't like the smell.

Ponytailed Grad Students -- This way to the guillotine.

“All of us have worked, all of us have achieved something. That is how we measure character, that’s how we measure what the value of a person is, not some arbitrary category imposed by some ponytailed grad students who have taken too many gender study seminars.”

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance,

Godzilla, an anti-environmentalist blockbuster

This is not another movie parroting the intellectually inferior a dishonest "environmentalist" ideology about the man who ruins Nature and may fix it.

Quite on the contrary, the movie points out that the alarmists spreading this meme are dangerous psychopaths.... They prepare a plan to save the Earth from these MUTOs – by detonating some thermonuclear bombs in San Francisco or something like that. Instead, they just murder Nancy Pelosi and thousands of her and their fellow liberals.

"If you killed every racist in the country right now, America would be all white again."

Sure, we say bad things about a race sometimes when we’re drinking a beer in a bar.

Nobody says it more than nonwhites. Hearing an old black guy talk about Jews would make Hitler blush. If an old Korean found out that his daughter was dating a black man, he’d spontaneously combust. If you killed every racist in the country right now, America would be all white again. And you’d be wrong to kill all those minorities. They don’t really mean it. People are too selfish to genuinely be racist.

Why futurologists are always wrong – and why we should be sceptical of techno-utopians

Futurologists are almost always wrong.

Indeed, Clive James invented a word – “Hermie” – to denote an inaccurate prediction by a futurologist. This was an ironic tribute to the cold war strategist and, in later life, pop futurologist Herman Kahn. It was slightly unfair, because Kahn made so many fairly obvious predictions – mobile phones and the like – that it was inevitable quite a few would be right.

Even poppier was Alvin Toffler, with his 1970 book Future Shock,

which suggested that the pace of technological change would cause psychological breakdown and social paralysis, not an obvious feature of the Facebook generation. Most inaccurate of all was Paul R Ehrlich who, in The Population Bomb, predicted that hundreds of millions would die of starvation in the 1970s. Hunger, in fact, has since declined quite rapidly.

15 Examples Of "Liberal Privilege"

9) If you work for a newspaper, a college, or in Hollywood,

you can freely spout your political beliefs at every opportunity without fear of facing any retaliation for your beliefs. As an added bonus, you can then tell everyone how "brave" you are for taking the same positions all of your friends and colleagues hold.

May 17, 2014

One reason America has such a dysfunctional health care system

is we have convinced ourselves it is not a business.

We think health care is this weird fusion of mystical religion, government service and natural resource. It is none of those things. It certainly should never be any of those things. Europeans made it a government service for the proletariat. It’s cheap and does the basics, but there’s a reason their elites don’t use the system. Africans and many Asians still treat medicine as a religion. The natural resource angle is an American invention. Our lunatics truly think health care is a magical well held hostage by insurance companies.

Don't

Tesla Posts $50 Million Loss; Toyota Withdraws Support

Adding in the Federal tax credit of $7,500 per vehicle and a state rebate of $2,500 per vehicle,

the state and federal incentives totaled as much as $45,000 per vehicle that Tesla sold for as much as $100,000, depending on the model and options.[vi] Essentially, regular taxpayers who buy typical cars, trucks and minivans are heavily subsidizing an additional car for a clientele whose average income is just under $300,000 per year.

Dear Class of 2014: Thanks for Not Disinviting Me

There’s no need for the ritual give and take of serious argument when, in your early 20s, you already know the answers to all questions.

How marvelous it must be to realize at so tender an age that you will never, ever change your mind, because you will never, ever encounter disagreement! How I wish I’d had your confidence and fortitude. I could have spared myself many hours of patient reflection and intellectual struggle over the great issues of the day.

Fame is a fickle food by Emily Dickinson

Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s corn
Men eat of it and die

May 16, 2014

The Ten Greatest Baseball Uniforms of All Time

The 1940′s Brooklyn Dodgers - During the forties, The Dodgers really let their playing do the talking, as they not only won three pennants but also managed to tear down the Major League’s color barrier. These understated uniforms, with little more than bold text and a “B” emblem, are the archetype for a classic baseball rig. . | A Continuous Lean.

I don’t believe in racism, sexism, or homophobia.

While all three are prevalent all over the world, I don’t think they exist here in the West.

Of course, there is a kid in a schoolyard right now saying “Nigger,” but there are so many black kids saying the same sort of thing about white people, it cancels itself out. There are some nutbars out there who don’t like people just because they’re black, but there are so many others who lavish preferential treatment on blacks, the sum of the game is zero racism.

I’m fond of saying that Obama is our first alien president.

I do that to piss of lefty, for the most part. But, the guy is a singular weirdo in our political history.

Everyone in the ruling class is alien to normal Americans, but Obama is alien to the aliens. By the time a candidate is nominated, we know everything there is to know about him from birth to that moment. With Obama, we’re still not sure about large swaths of his life, including where he was born. He never tells stories about his youth or about when he was starting out in life. No one shows up on TV talking about their friendship with Obama.

In America Today the Bullshit Always Rises

prompted subjects to report a worsening of gastrointestinal symptoms to similar degrees. Reported pain, bloating, nausea, and gas all increased over the baseline low-FODMAP diet. Even in the second experiment, when the placebo diet was identical to the baseline diet, subjects reported a worsening of symptoms!

11 Reasons the Left Has Not Won the Culture War

9. While we're paying for Sandra Fluke's right to birth control, we're prevailing on our Second Amendment civil rights in ways unimagined just ten years ago.

10. While our federal government is constructing Orwellian First Amendment Zones, the Supreme Court is slowly suffocating the campaign finance laws that gave our government, union and media overseers a near-monopoly on political speech. 11. Occupy is dead. The Tea Party lives.

Mile High Buh-Bye

When passengers noticed they had been in the bathroom for a suspiciously long time,

crew members alerted the captain, and authorities dispatched a pair of fighter jets to accompany the flight into Detroit. On ordinary days, when calling in a military escort would be over the top, what are flight attendants supposed to do when they happen upon an attempt to join the mile-high club?

Where?

Where now are the horse and the rider?
Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk,
And the bright hair flowing?
Where is the harp on the harpstring,
And the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest
And the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain,
Like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West
Behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke
Of the deadwood burning,
Or behold the flowing years
From the Sea returning?
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

[Bumped] Will Anyone Dare Question Why Hillary Took Six Months To Recover From Concussion?

In a word, "No."

"Nowhere on network television was there any serious discussion of the actual news-making moment from Clinton's Q & A session in New York Wednesday. In explaining the fall and subsequent recovery, Clinton said the former Secretary of State “required six months of very serious work to get over” her “terrible concussion.” Six months? That's new information, isn't it?

May 15, 2014

So they’ll keep firing their Tweets, hashtags and selfies.

But underneath the disdain, the old lofty confidence seems gone.

Even the NYT is worried about its future. It is no longer assured and the inmates of Prince Prospero’s castle are starting to wonder, who that masqued man rushing through the ball might be? About whether they were wrong about something basic since nothing works and what does work — like people grubbing for oil — wasn’t supposed to.

"You go down there lookin' for justice, that's what you find. Just Us."

Although blacks are only a small percentage of our community, the courthouse is filled with them:

the halls and gallery benches are overflowing with black defendants, families, and crime victims. Most whites with business in court arrive quietly, dress appropriately, and keep their heads down. They get in and get out–if they can–as fast as they can. For blacks, the courthouse is like a carnival. They all seem to know each other: hundreds and hundreds each day, gossiping, laughing loudly, waving, and crowding the halls.

Relax. Nobody, but nobody, expects that of you.

What we believe is based upon our perceptions.

What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality. - Gary Zukav

African Women and HIV: Stupidity in the New York Times

Women make up more infections in Africa because homosexuality is more concentrated in the developed world.

They have problems in Africa like rape, lack of condom use, and promiscuity. This parasite explanation is a joke. It does not stand up, but it is not meant to stand up. The theory is being selected and boosted in the Times because the Times wants you to see African ladies in the field and feel pity that a parasite is making them catch HIV. Shucks, why are women 60% of HIV cases in Africa but much less elsewhere? It couldn’t be the gay vector to the disease being different in different regions. What gay vector, you homophobe? It couldn’t be rape: that might take them dangerously close to mentioning the absurd prevalence of rape in South Africa, the glorious rainbow nation. Nor could it be promiscuity: no, that would be slut-shaming

In the Progressive World,

women are inherently interested in killing their children, Hispanics are genetically predisposed towards open border anarchism, and black people arenaturally dependent upon the redistributive schemes of white liberal politicians....

Now, with this in mind, we understand why racist white liberals have decreed that black people don’t know how to obtain a driver’s license, and anyone who thinks a driver’s license ought to be required for voting must be involved in a nefarious conspiracy to suppress the black vote.

Islam's War on Women Rolls On

Islam: The Religion for Tomorrow! Sudan woman faces death for apostasy: A Sudanese court has sentenced a woman to hang for apostasy after she left Islam and married a Christian man. "We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged to death," the judge told the woman, AFP reports.

Suppose the world isn’t being wracked by issues like “smart girls” or “gay rights”.

What if the world is going to pieces over oil, national rivalry, rampant political corruption and the rise of unopposed tyranny?

If you hold the newspaper at just the right angle, you’ll glimpse it. Recently, Caroline Glick talked about the disappearance of American will. The actual problem may be slightly different. The more precise statement is the disappearance of the public’s ability to see the truth.

May 14, 2014

"The apoliticism of the US military is something that we must preserve at all costs."

"Obama and allies have been politicizing the military, especially the flag ranks, as fast as they can.

It has been abundantly clear for a long time that one-star officers who want to see two, and especially two-stars who want to see more, will be promoted on the basis of their political reliability in adopting and enforcing the administration's leftist, P.C., soft socialism."

How the West Won The Great Hashtag War of 2014

Led by the bravery of First Lady Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Democratic women of the United States Senate, the West tweeted Boko Haram into submission.

When Obama released the H-bomb of twitter — a sad duck-faced picture of herself in an empty room holding a sign reading #BringBackOurGirls — total victory was achieved: 276 Nigerian girls who had been kidnapped and converted to Islam avoided sale into sex slavery, and the 150 Nigerians murdered by Boko Haram just last week suddenly sprang back to life.

This Just In

Email Notes from All Over

Dear Heteronormative Operative:

Why are you not doing your fair share of oppressing? This is a sad waste of wonderful talent. How can future victims bewail the sins of the rich old white guys if those sins are never committed? The tea party is counting on you! Nancy P., Michelle O., and Debbie W/S are standing by to harangue and condemn! Get out there and create a hostile breathing environment for the terminally clueless! Do it for the children!

(This public service announcement brought to you by the Whiter Indians than Warren Foundation and the Seattle Womyn Whyners Network. Don't forget to tip your barista, the minimum wage is still under $25/hour.)

Yes, but are they really happy with their role in the Milky Way?

Fake, Phony, Fraud

The list of affirmative fakes is now long and inglorious,

from Alex Haley's heavily fictional and heavily plagiarized ROOTS to most recently Annette Gordon Reed's clear misreading of the genetic indicators of Sally Heming's family descent achieving both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. And you don't have to be black to play the game, as we can see by watching Elizabeth Warren parley her totally undocumented assertions of her "indian heritage" into a position at Harvard Law and then the US Senate.

May 13, 2014

The Card with No Limit

"I sure love my Race Card! It comes in handy whenever I find myself in a mess I've made. I just bring it out and 'voila', the mess is overlooked. In fact, there's no limit on how many times I can use it! I highly recommend the Race Card. Don't leave home without it." -- BHO (Also endorsed by Al $harpton, Jessie Jackson and Eric Holder.)

(Mood) Indigo Tomatoes:

Yes, you can now grow a blue tomato if you so desire,

thanks to breeders' recent successes with anthocyanin, the compound that gives blueberries and eggplants their dusky hue. Jim Myers, a professor in Oregon State University's horticulture department, started working on indigo varieties more than a decade ago with genetic material from wild tomatoes from Chile and the Galapagos Islands.

What Difference Does It Make If Hillary Has Brain Damage?

If Hillary has brain damage, what difference does it make now?

What possible different does it make now how it happened, or even if she has brain damage. If you're gonna start going down this road with Mrs. Clinton, you've gotta go back a little farther than December of 2012. I mean, you remember how Hillary couldn't remember where she put the Rose Law Firm billing records. She couldn't remember how she got hold of those 900 FBI files that she and Bill had somewhere. Her answer to most questions back then was that she couldn't remember, and so forth.

I will give ten whole bucks to anyone who can find an example of a feminist

who is not an avowed Satanist stating that it is not fair that the Prince of Darkness is always a he.

Isn’t it strange and perplexing that feminists worry incessantly about the lower numbers of women at the top — among CEO’s and other muckety-mucks — but are silent when it comes to the relatively low numbers of women in the working trades and even much lower, among criminals and drunks who live on the streets? I have never encountered a feminist who was upset that there are not more women mowing lawns, fixing sewer lines or working as “tree surgeons.” Hmm, I wonder why.

The Last Communist City by Michael J. Totten

Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami.

Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.

The first red flag is the Indian heritage stuff.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that Indians just know how to recognize Indian stuff.

And of course, he is Cherokee. They always pick the cool tribes. The Fake Indian from Massachusetts, who is really a WASP, claims to be Cherokee. I bet if we learn that the Cherokee were cannibals the number of people claiming to be Cherokee would suddenly plummet. Anyway, the medicine wheel nonsense is a nice touch.

“She said, ‘I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,’” Kehaly said.

Of course you were, and of course you now are.

Progressivism, or at least its braindead American strain, has no desire to live up to its own inane demands. Progressive policies are meant for other people, not them. This is why we have a president who complains about income inequality yet who spends forty million dollars on vacations during his tenure. Trial of the Century

May 12, 2014

We no longer live in an Apple world.

Apple dominated music because of the seamless interface of the iPod and iTunes, with the iTunes Store the glue holding it all together.

Apple no longer has a market monopoly, and the company is too stupid to strive for this. End game with the iPhone is death (or a niche product with declining software, which IS death). We’ve seen this movie a zillion times before, most famously with the Macintosh. Apple triumphed in this century by dominating, first with the iPod, then with the iPhone and then with the iPad. As that dominance erodes, you come up with a new dominant product, one that hopefully ties all your others together, so far Tim Cook has failed to do this.

Obama's Perverts Could Have Just Bought Health Insurance for the Drooling Dimwits Among Us and Have Had Millions Left Over

developing four state Obamacare exchanges that are now in shambles — and the final price tag for salvaging them may go sharply higher. Each of the states — Massachusetts, Oregon, Nevada and Maryland — embraced Obamacare, and each underperformed.

"Two Weeks Ago, I Almost Died in the Deadliest Plane Crash Ever "

Weightless and staring downhill at the thirty-some rows of passengers ahead of me,

I had a rare and terrible reminder of the absurd improbability of human flight. We were hairless apes crowded into a thin metal tube hurtling through the sky at a speed and height beyond anything evolution prepared us to comprehend. The violence was over after a few seconds. United 1205 leveled out, having dropped at least 600 feet without warning.

The NFL Goes All-Gay

A nicer thing couldn’t happen to a more deserving league. ...

The NFL has traded an audience that doesn’t matter: media types, women, gays, for one that does: middle aged, middle class White guys. Who I assure you don’t care for gay smooches.... I couldn’t be happier. The sooner the NFL dies, the better. If religion was the opiate of the masses, back in the 19th Century, professional and college sports plays that role today.

Solutions to kidnapped children in Africa

3. Offer bounties. Pay $1,000 for each girl that is rescued, no questions asked.

Michelle and Oprah could fund the bounties out of their own pockets, if they care that much. Oh… but they don’t. They only care about using it to “raise awareness” that can lead to fundraising and using your money. They like feeling good about taking the moral high ground without the bothersome problem of rearranging their travel and entertainment schedules.

Washington Monument reopens after three years.

It’s a hollow obelisk 555 feet high made out of three different kinds of marble and 36,000 stone blocks.

When the earthquake struck, it whipsawed the obelisk, showering debris on the tourists climbing its vertiginous heights.... It required 2.7 miles of new sealant between stones, and 53 stainless steel “saddle anchors” to bolt in place slabs on the monument’s slanted pyramidion in case of another earthquake.

Dear John,

You show up to provide moral support to the murderers and go home as their useful idiot.

That was the pitiful function you served in Paris, in Nicaragua and in Israel. Forty-four years later you're still departing with that same awkward look on your face as if somewhere beneath the layers of Botox and suntan lotion you understand that something is wrong.

"There's more faculty interest in climate control than in the Western canon."

Multiculturalism guarantees that courses on Islam

highlight all the good that can be said of Muhammad and the Quran, but there is no comparable academic commitment to reinvigorating the foundational teachings of American liberal democracy or to strengthening the legacy bequeathed to us by "dead white males."

May 11, 2014

The Day Obama's Presidency Died

The curious thing about September 11, 2012 — the day of the Benghazhi attack — is that for some reason it marks the decline of the Obama presidency as clearly as a milepost.

We are told by the papers that nothing much happened on that day. A riot in a far-away country. A few people killed. And yet … it may be coincidental, but from that day the administration’s foreign policy seemed inexplicably hexed. The Arab Spring ground to a halt. The Secretary of State ‘resigned’. The CIA Director was cast out in disgrace. Not long after, Obama had to withdraw his Red Line in Syria. Al-Qaeda, whose eulogy he had pronounced appeared with disturbing force throughout Africa, South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Almost as if on cue, Russia made an unexpected return to the world stage, first in Syria, then in the Iranian nuclear negotiations.

My Date With A Libdude

Looking right in his eyes with a serious look on my face, I leaned forward and quietly said, “I cant imagine having to spend more than a minute or two in the presence of a liberal who is talking about politics!” Ahh! KABOOM! There it was. THAT was the money shot I was looking for. - Return of Queens

School Daze: An assignment for 8th grade students at a school district in California

"You will read and discuss multiple, credible articles on this issue, and write an argumentative essay, based upon cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe this was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth. Remember to address counterclaims (rebuttals) to your stated claim."

Coming next: examining the evidence for and against the existence of slavery in the United States. Some argue that slavery is, in fact, a myth designed to explain why black people have historically been under-represented in the upper echelons of American society; a myth which allows them to get all uppity and riled up about perceived injustices instead of getting on with their lives and making money, like decent folks do...

The Science Is Settled

How’s that for a headline? It ran in the New York Times Sunday magazine on Aug. 27, 1911:

Canals a thousand miles long and twenty miles wide are simply beyond our comprehension.

The Times was relying on Percival Lowell, who was convinced that a dying Martian civilization was struggling to reach the planet’s ice caps. “The whole thing is wonderfully clear-cut,” he’d told the newspaper — but he was already largely ostracized by skeptical colleagues who couldn’t duplicate his findings. The “spokes” he later saw on Venus may have been blood vessels in his own eye.

May 10, 2014

We’re up to some fifteen or sixteen weeks of President Babble-a-Lot and Secretary-of-State Jibber-Jabber

grabbing podiums and drawling a lot of nonsense into banks of microphones

about “must must must” and “shall not stand.” When they do that, and I have to look at them, I see Jimmy Carter. I see Neville Chamberlain. I see Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. My only son is turning seventeen soon.

Hi Mom, thanks for never taking me to Disney World

Thank you for never getting that bigger house or those nicer cars.

Thank you for never taking us to Disney World. Thank you for never buying me the latest video game system. Thank you for a humble life â a life of hand-me-down clothes and beat up Astro passenger vans and six kids crammed into three bedrooms â because you and Dad had different priorities . Thank you, because you had six kids, and you stayed home to raise us â to be there for us, to teach us, to mold us, to love us, to discipline us â and that meant less Happy Meals and fancy toys, but more life, more joy, more love. -- The Matt Walsh Blog

Progressivism, or at least its braindead American strain,

has no desire to live up to its own inane demands. Progressive policies are meant for other people, not them.

This is why we have a president who complains about income inequality yet who spends forty million dollars on vacations during his tenure. And it’s why global warmists and climate change fanatics from sea to acidified sea would be utterly hostile towards any of their pet environmental policies if they were actually enacted. Higher prices and a lower standard of living are not for their kind; they’re all for climate change action now, but when they have to pay for it, you won’t see many of them “stepping up.”

#BringBackOurBalls: Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn't actually involve standing with Ukraine,

so #BringBackOurGirls doesn't require bringing back our girls.

There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama's hashtag is just a form of moral preening. But then what isn't?

Richard Pryor: "You go down there looking for justice, that's what you find: just us."

I then describe the strengths and weaknesses of our case.

The weaknesses are usually obvious: There are five eyewitnesses against you. Or, you made a confession to both the detective and your grandmother. They found you in possession of a pink cell phone with a case that has rhinestones spelling the name of the victim of the robbery. There is a video of the murderer wearing the same shirt you were wearing when you were arrested, which has the words “In Da Houz” on the back, not to mention you have the same “RIP Pookie 7/4/12” tattoo on your neck as the man in the video.

Fear of Frankenfoods

Just in case you were looking for a new way to practice pagan idolatry, the state of Vermont has passed a law that will permit you to eliminate genetically modified foods from your diet. -- Had Enough Therapy?

How could a bottom-ranked NFL team not camp this twofer?

Here, I’ll trust those five scouts in McGinn’s poll who said they would sign him. It would be crazy for no team to at least give the SEC player of the year a look in camp. From a pure football perspective, it’s a low-risk, potential high-reward move.... If no NFL team extends Sam an invite to camp, that’s when things get fishy. That would reek of weakness and bigotry.

May 9, 2014

THIMK!

U.N. Report On Magical Realism Warns Of Increased Incidences Of Women’s Tears Flooding The Entire World

The U.N. paper states that these fantastic and potentially catastrophic events,

in which a woman unleashes an endless torrent of tears over her deceased husband or the sting of unrequited love, may raise global sea levels by as much as 30 centimeters by the year 2050, which according to projections could lead to widespread coastal erosion and leave many of the world’s largest cities—including New York, Mumbai, and Jakarta—at least partially underwater.

The children we profess to love are drugged against ADD,

hunted by pedophiles who are unaccountably more numerous than before.

For play they have rubbery health and safety things, in place of things like climbing trees or discovering their neighborhoods. It means being enclosed in “schools” some of which can’t even teach them to read their names yet require they stay in place when some nutcase comes a-gunning for them, without even the protection of their elders, who are curiously disallowed the means to defend their charges, maybe for the first time since humanity emerged.

"Are We Really This Powerless? " [Bumped]

There's Mrs. Obama looking sad and grim,

and the sad thing here is that the low-information crowd that's puddling around out there on Twitter is gonna think we're actually doing something about it. Here it is again, closer. See it? Is that not pathetic? What the hell message does that send? Can you imagine? They're laughing at this over in the huts and so forth wherever they are. It is just unbelievable. #BringBackOurGirls. They're Nigerian, unless there's something that we don't know.

Who Says There's No Good News?

“We are checking the preparedness of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, we are holding an exercise,” Putin was quoted as saying, noting that the exercises were planned in November and involved all branches and services throughout the country, including nuclear forces.

Obama: “Every day when I wake up, and I think about young girls in Nigeria”

World's most insufferable chunk of fossilized feces recalls....

"Making sure jobs are available is the first thing I think about when I wake up every morning. It’s the last thing I think about when I go to bed each night.” .... “The first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about when I go to bed is making sure that I’m doing everything I can to keep Americans safe,” ... “And yet every day when I wake up, and I think about young girls in Nigeria or children caught up in the conflict in Syria . . . there are times in which I want to reach out and save those kids.”

Monogamy Envy

With Mother’s Day nigh, you brace yourself for pieces in Slate and Salon along the lines of “To Hell with Motherhood: The Case for a Holiday to Celebrate the Real Victims of Kermit Gosnell, His Underpaid Staff” or “I’m Sick of Pretending I Love My Child.” LILEKS, James @ National Review Online

The centuries-old (dating from 1484) Royal authority governing the practices of heraldry in Great Britain hath updated its code:

"(1) A man who contracts a same-sex marriage may impale the arms of his husband with his own

on a shield or banner but should bear his own crest rather than the crests of both parties. The coat of arms of each party to the marriage will be distinguishable (1) by the arms of the individual concerned being placed on the dexter side of the shield or banner and (2) by the crest (when included). When one of the parties to the marriage dies, the survivor may continue to bear the combined arms on a shield or banner."

The Newfound 'Islamophobia' of the Left

The uniformed provodnitsa rules over her fiefdom like a benign dictator with a weird hairdo.

A Russian second-class sleeper carriage has nine compartments, called kupe, each with four berths, two upper (nad) and two lower (pod).

Wherever you board, you find on your bunk a polythene-wrapped package containing linen, towels, a toothbrush and a pair of slippers. The uniformed provodnitsa rules over her fiefdom like a benign dictator with a weird hairdo. At larger stations on that first trip, ours climbed off to buy snacks from itinerant platform vendors. These she sold on to passengers over the journey. At Svir I bought a bag of Karelian dried smelt; the fishiness perfumed the compartment all the way to Petrozavodsk.

It's Always Something

Hey Kids!

Welcome to 1969: Mad Men's Award-Winning Set Design

In every picture of an office from 1930 on, the wires are cut off every lamp, because they look terrible.

I tell the set-design team, "Put the wires on!" Right away, something happens. Why is there all that ugly stuff hanging off the desks? Because that's how it would really be. It's just as important for me to show a character's open desk drawer with a half roll of Life Savers, with the paper rolled back, as it is to find the perfect dining table.

A massive problem in contemporary intellectual discourse

is that people don't remember the past well

and don't have a critical attitude toward whatever is the latest conventional wisdom about the backwardness of the past. In the Obama Era, we see race and sex disparities all around us, and the only socially acceptable explanation for them is that the past was so incredibly racist/sexist until ... well, nobody can quite remember when, but it must have been practically the day before yesterday.

The public debate always assumes

that way back in like last week, homosexuals were in bondage,

forced to work on lavender farms in the South. There’s never any evidence presented, other than the obligatory reference to Stonewall, justifying the assumption. Famous homosexuals have been erased from history, because they could not have existed, according to modern thinkers.

May 8, 2014

Not Just an Oval Office Problem Anymore

Apples of Eden: Saving the Wild Ancestor of Modern Apples

Malus sieversii — a wild apple that Newton describes as "small but highly colored with a very nice sweet flavor"—is one of the key ancestors of all cultivated apples grown and eaten around the world.

So rich and unique is this species, Newton says, that on one wild apple tree, "you can see more variation in apple form than you see in the entire cultivated apple crop in Britain. You can get variation in fruit size, shape, color, flavor, even within the tree, and certainly from tree to tree." Some fruit species, including wild apricot, are imperiled by overcollection of seeds by national and international plant-breeding companies. Pretty flowers can also become a liability: The pink blooms of one endangered species of wild almond from Kazakhstan, for example, are "particularly in demand for International Women's Day," according to Newton's report.

The supposed dose of reality comes with the recognition that Obama has committed “significant missteps,”

although that’s tempered by the unsupported notion that they are “few” in number. Well, everybody makes mistakes, don’t they? The rest of the problem for Obama is, according to the Times, a combination of just plain bad luck (unnamed “circumstances beyond his control”); the fault of others noticing his own wonderfulness (“unreasonable expectations”—presumably expectations for Obama and not by Obama); his calm character, heretofore considered a good thing, but which the Times admits can be “maddening.”

May 7, 2014

These days I mostly avoid having anything to do with Lefty.

The few liberal friends I still have are “weather and sports” only friends.

Anything that bumps up against the tenets of the Cult, even tangentially, is avoided. Everywhere you turn a lunatic is preaching at you about gay marriage, the war on women, racism, white privilege and on and on. I often feel like Robert Neville in the book I am Legend. Instead of raging vampires, I’m surrounded by lunatic liberals shaking their piety bracelets at me.

The Arab Situation in the Middle East Clairified in One Minute and Twenty-Two Seconds

"When I look at the actual Tea Party candidates and the actual races they actually lose and how and why,

there’s no need to invoke some nefarious conspiracy.

The candidates they field had better be smart, appealing, and not so numerous that they split the conservative vote. That’s not rocket science to figure out, although it’s not all that easy to accomplish. So stop whining about what victims you are and start figuring out how to win.

Save the boozy lunch!

"I’ll have a Bloody Mary instead please."

My lunch companion cracked up when the waiter innocently asked if I would like vodka in that. Welcome to America, land of the free, where the boozy lunch goes to die. Fast forward a year to London and this barbaric phenomenon is ruining every great trade. The City has been suffering under this tedious American tendency for the best part of a decade now, but it’s spreading like the pox.

Pursuing the truth too far

‘New evidence strongly suggests that the very different kinds of society seen in the various races

and in the world’s great civilizations differ not just because of their received culture – in other words, in what is learned from birth – but also because of variations in the social behaviour of their members, carried down in their genes.’ Wade is critical of leading biologists, economists and psychologists who have simply dismissed possible non-cultural explanations as racist, or who pin their hopes in geographic determinism, or shy away from recent evolution because of the political implications. This, he says, has nothing to do with its scientific validity but the ‘political dangers’ that researchers face in ‘pursuing the truth too far’.

The insufferable Ma Joad (she's symbolic, so she doesn't have a first name)

-- who oscillates between threatening to bash her menfolk with blunt instruments ("knock you belly-up with a bucket," "slap ya with a stick a stove wood") when they don't do what she wants and serving as a mouthpiece for Steinbeck's hick-collectivist platitudes: "Maybe if we was all mad in the same way." Let's put her in the White House!

The Trend Is Toast

“All the guy was doing was slicing inch-thick pieces of bread,

putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them.” Later, he writes, “I rolled my eyes. How silly; how twee; how perfectly San Francisco, this toast,” and quotes the manager of the café where he first noticed it: “Tip of the hipster spear.”

May 6, 2014

Duranty Prize Awarded

THE DURANTY FOR 2013:

David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times for his supposedly thorough unraveling of the Benghazi affair, “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” which was revealed almost instantly to be a meretricious piece of deception worthy of Walter Duranty himself. Presentation speech by Roger Kimball.

THE RATHER:

Seymour Hersh for a lifetime of astonishingly dishonest journalism on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Presentation speech by Roger L. SimonRoger L. Simon ｻ

Strangely no alcohol seems to have been involved

South African Steven Cohen danced for 10 minutes near Eiffel tower in Paris before police intervened. ...As for the rooster, Tricoire said the only time it was "manhandled" was by police during Cohen's arrest. The animal is now in a chicken coop and living "a totally happy life in Normandy".

Hillary: Because Vagina

Politico reports that according to a copy of the invitation, the event—for which Clinton will be the “star attraction”—is “stacked” with her supporters. The fundraiser is being hosted by Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild at her Manhattan home, and will feature high-profile political activists such as Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel and Jill Iscol.

Robot of Jihad? A Guide to Tipu’s Tiger

An eighteenth-century automaton in the image of a tiger mauling a British soldier,

whose groans mingle with his killer’s roar, has thrilled millions of tourists and inspired some of the English language’s finest poets. It is one of the British Empire’s most celebrated prizes, stolen in 1799 from the court of Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore.

Anger always trumps fact in the Victim Value Index.

The VVI isn't really about the past.

Or even the present. It's about how forceful your activism is in the present. The VVI isn't really about equality. It's a series of tryouts for leftist activism. It doesn't matter if your people are enslaved dwarves living in a coal mine run by capitalist cannibals. If they can't show up at rallies and vote three times on election day, they're not much good to the left. They'll get their own PBS documentary and that's it.

May 5, 2014

If you are a member of the Cult of Modern Liberalism,

it’s feeling like 1972 in San Francisco.

The Summer of Love is a distant memory and all the promise of that time amounted to nothing. More broadly speaking, this last fevered push by the Left never had much going for it. Health care is a math problem, not a moral problem. The rest of their agenda amounts to nothing more than silly fads cooked up by college professors with too much time on their hands. Otherwise, it has been a bunch of true believers looking for a cause. The other side of the coin is the Right has nothing to offer at the moment.

I’m skeptical about Cankles winning on the Democrat side.

She angered the hard core fanatics back

in the 1990′s and never went through the proper self-criticism sessions as part of their rehabilitation ritual. It’s what gave Obama the opening. The Democrats have nominated some hilarious losers, but a maladroit clodhopper like Obama normally would have been just a sideshow. Hatred of Hillary gave Obama a stage. Things have not changed much and I can see a similar dynamic unfolding with Fake Indian.

Should We Destroy Our Last Living Samples of the Virus That Causes Smallpox?

If you even hesitated to answer this question, there's something wrong with you. You shouldn't need to see the picture of a child with smallpox to answer it, either. - - Maggie's FarmExactly so. When will we learn? When you have a mortal and implacable enemy down, you do not save him for study. You kill him. You kill him filthy and ten miles beyond dead.

The "White Death."

Upon news of the hostilities,

he gathered up food, plain white camouflage, and his iron-sighted SAKO M/28-30--a variant of the Soviet Mosin-Nagant rifle--and went to defend his country. .... 21 December 1939 was Häyhä's personal record for a single day with 25 confirmed Russian kills. Around this time, Häyhä surpassed 500 confirmed kills between the rifle and SMG. When the Russians finally figured out there was just one guy with a rifle killing dozens of their men, they started referring to him as "The White Death."

“Young people today get their news from The Daily Show!!!”

One reason Rush Limbaugh makes $40 million a year is because he stubbornly points out that one plus one equals two, when everyone else insist it equals 492 or “avocado” or “shut up.” Quite simply: The Daily Show has one million (cue Dr. Evil soundbite) viewers. But as Rush points out: There are way more than one million college students in America.

"I abandoned egalitarianism not only when it became evident that it was a goofy, fraudulent, and ultimately destructive premise—I wiped it off my shoe when its adherents began acting more and more like religious fanatics. Please share this article by

For the time being at least, secular global egalitarianism postures as tolerant of all religious beliefs,

despite its tendency to specifically degrade Christianity, which is likely because Christianity remains its biggest rival. But just as Islam tends to be somewhat “tolerant” so long as its adherents remain a minority in any given area, I suspect that the more that the Holy Church of Global Human Equality gains power, the less tolerant it will become of any belief system that deviates in the slightest niggling way from the sacred tenets of the Iron Rainbow.

Who Says There's No Good News?

There are now 20 still open, and after the law's last steps of implementation are taken in September, all but six are expected to close. Most of the closed clinics will never reopen, their operators say.

"The soldier is not so sacred as he once was."

"Who can countthe dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel." Numbers 23:10 The soldier is not so sacred as he once was.

The journalist and the judge have taken his place. The actors sneer from their theaters. The politicians gobble their free food and babble of peace. Musicians sing shrilly of flowers in gun barrels and doves everywhere. But the soldier still stands where he must. The borders have shrunk. The old victories have been exchanged for diplomatic defeats. From the old strongholds come missiles and rockets. And children hide in bomb shelters waiting for the worst to pass. This is the doing of the journalist and the judge, the politician and the actor, the lions of literature who send autographed copies of their books to imprisoned terrorists and the grandchildren of great men who hire themselves on in service to the enemy.

1980: How Jack Nicholson became The Joker

When producer Michael Uslan was first thinking about

how to bring a darker version of Batman to the big screen, back in 1980, he saw a photo of Jack Nicholson from The Shining in the newspaper — and he started drawing on it. Uslan turned Nicholson’s famous “Here’s Johnny!” face into the Clown Prince of Crime.

What Was the Benghazi Cover-Up All About? — Victor Davis Hanson

2) Blaming the filmmaker offered liberals the chance

to affirm that reactionaries and bigots are the source of much of the world’s troubles. Therefore, jailing Mr. Nakoula was loud validation of the Obama Administration’s progressive, multicultural bona fides, and proof that Obama has zero tolerance for such “hate speech.”

What Changed? #327

How’s this for a scene:

— Hillary at the Benghazi victims’ funeral reassuring the grieving parents they’ll get that “evil filmmaker” who’s behind their sons’ murders when all the while she knows that’s baloney? Wow. Great stuff. Straight out of a vampire movie – Dracula or even the classic Nosferatu. Roger L. Simon » All the President's Dudes

“Can you pass me a Tyrant?”

In addition to the tyrants in the collection

—Idi Amin Dada, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saparmurat Niazov, Saddam Hussein, Mao Tse Tung, and the one who makes the others seem like soulmates of Rand Paul, Kim Il Sung—I bought the last banknote issued under Colonel Ghadaffi’s regime , with a picture of the Colonel himself, dressed oddly as ever, with a kind of sheet over his head almost like a medieval wimple....

May 4, 2014

Baby Boomers Discover Actual Use for Millennial Hipsters

Cave Pussy (n.)

1. Humankind’s very first liberals, the cavemen who never bothered to learn to hunt or to brew ale;

when the cave-conservatives dragged a big carcass back to the fire to carve up and feed everybody, the cave-pussies felt the need to justify their share of the meat, and so contributed some rules about how to divide it all up. Later on, they invented claiming credit for the meat, blaming the conservatives for whatever food poisoning might have happened, and vegetarianism.2. Any modern day successor of the original cave pussies.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

Just as the Red Guards were merely a bunch of physically youthful dupes simply doing the dirty work of old guys

(as were the Hitler Youth), not a genuinely autonomous movement of the young, events at Rutgers and the Correspondent’s dinner resembled nothing so much as grant-starveling students trying to suck up to the faculty or a meeting of the Soviet Union of Writers. They were both were as daring as an officially sanctioned performance of the Detachment of Red Women.

The Medieval Dancing Plague, When Getting Down Literally Killed You

The dancing plague all started when a woman identified only as Frau Troffea stepped out of her house

in early July 1518 and began dancing. After nearly a week of the woman’s nonstop flailing, a group of about 30 people had joined her. Reports say that as many as 400 people eventually began dancing in the street, but it was hardly the celebration imagined by Martha & the Vandellas in their 1964 hit song of that title. The melee continued for more than two months, causing people to drop over from heart attacks, strokes and exhaustion.

The American Newspaper is Dead and it’s a Good Thing

Newspaper print advertising revenues of just $17.3 billion in 2013 fell to the lowest level of print advertising

since the NAA started tracking industry data in 1950. In constant 2013 dollars, advertising revenues last year were $2.7 billion (and 13.5%) below the $20 billion spent in 1950, 62 years ago.... That doesn’t mean that the Great Booming Voice of Media Liberalism is dead. But it does mean that it is losing much of its authority. Its credibility numbers are poor and it’s increasingly relying on shrillness and volume.

How the 'Jesus' Wife' Hoax Fell Apart

On April 24, Christian Askeland — a Coptic specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University and my colleague at the Green Scholars Initiative—revealed that the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife," as the fragment is known, was a match for a papyrus fragment that is clearly a forgery. - - WSJ.com

May 2, 2014

What's coming down the pipe is scary - a mentally infected or diseased generation.

When I say "infected" or "diseased" I mean I look at the kids today, especially of college age, and realize they have a genuine mental condition.

We can all laugh and mock them citing examples of entitlement, weakness, and idiocy, highlighting stories where they demand free education or have their parents attend a job interview with them or Pajama Boy's latest antics, but these are merely the symptoms of a much larger and threatening sickness. One where nearly an entire generation is incapable of understanding other people's rights, freedom, and property.

The entire bottle economy,

is artificial. The United States is not so poor that it actually needs to recycle.

It recycles not under the impulse of economic imperatives, but of government mandates. The elderly Chinese women dig through the trash because politicians decided to impose a tax on us and an incentive for them in the form of a deposit. All those useless 1980s laws created a strange underground economy of marginalized people digging through the trash.

An Open Letter to Bearded Hipsters

You GIANT PUSSY. Am I reading “Cosmo”? What the fuck is going on here? Betty White has bigger balls than you.

Look, I know I sound harsh, but I’m actually trying to rein myself in. A beard is meant to keep your face warm. Seriously, that’s it. You guys had your warm beards so you could go out and hunt us food, and we had our boobies with warm milk to feed the young’uns. That’s why I love beards. It is a natural, physiological response. I want a man who can keep me safe. How did it all get so twisted?

The Nusance Segment

If every cost that made up the price of a product was listed, “stupid people’ would be on there somewhere.

On every product in your house, you will find a warning label. On the shampoo bottle I have in my hand, there are two paragraphs explaining what not to do with it. No one expects the stupid to read these labels, of course. Someone dumb enough to drink shampoo or shove the bottle up their arse is not going to read the warning label.

Burning Internet Question Answered

Right now someone who works for Facebook

is getting tens of thousands of error messages

and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There's a team at a Google office that hasn't slept in three days. Somewhere there's a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she's dead. And if these people stop, the world burns.

Better Rat Traps and Rats

The Better Rat Trap: 1882 Patent Drawing. Easy to make. It is a bit expensive though, requiring a Colt 1860 Army Revolver.

Blood & Treasure: the enemy advances Our house has become the contested territory in a four legged combat that bears quite a remarkable resemblance to a classic Maoist People's War, with cat and dog as insurgent and regime respectively.

The trademark of the Obama years has been the strange reticence to disclose information that we would not normally regard as sensitive or even private. Information on questions like ‘where were you born’, ‘what were your grades in college’ and now ‘what was the president doing on the night a US ambassador was being murdered’

May 1, 2014

Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works.

Why do we tell you to turn it off and on again?

Because we don't have the slightest clue what's wrong with it, and it's really easy to induce coma in computers and have their built-in team of automatic doctors try to figure it out for us. The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad.

Doublethink v. SCOTUS - Why the gross overreaction? Jobs. Admitting hordes of underqualified students to top schools is an employment bonanza for middle-class blacks.

EBay's Big Bet on America - WSJ.com This week the California technology company announced that it's paying $3 billion in U.S. taxes for the privilege of bringing home $9 billion in cash that is currently held in overseas subsidiaries.

This administration is trying to take credit for and herald the “falling budget deficit.”

Here are the facts about the so-called “falling budget deficit.” The six budget deficits under Obama are the six highest budget deficits in history.

Six for six! In 2009, the deficit under Obama was more than $1.4 trillion. In fact, we saw deficits of more than a trillion dollars from 2009 through 2012. Now that the deficit is back in the hundreds of billions, the Democrats deny we have a government-overspending problem. But this year’s budget deficit – the smallest under Obama – is still higher than any in American history under any president not named Obama.